Blog

Lifehacker just posted about PayPal starting a service for this:
PayPal via your cell phone – Lifehacker
and a commenter gives credit where credit is due, noting that TextPayMe.com was doing it first…

this is a trend i am really excited about… a logical step in technology… i never have cash on me anymore, just plastic, and there are so many times cash would come in handy, but, not enough of them to bother with carrying cash at all times… this would solve the whole thing…

i titled this entry “exchanging money via cell phones is coming” rather than “is here” because i doubt anyone i know, nor the majority of the population, is signed up for either service, so, let me be a voice shouting to everyone i know that reads my blog, encouraging you to sign up for one service or the other… at this point, pretty much EVERYONE has more than one reason to have a paypal account, and most people could find a reason or two to have text messaging…

so, please… do it…
and if you do, i promise no more excuses next time it comes to splitting the bill at starbucks 😛

if you have been too busy playing with google earth to explore windows live local’s “bird’s eye” views, here’s a very cool way to get acquainted with it…

Bird’s Eye Tourist

From the site:

First Google brought us Google Local and Google Earth. Then Microsoft followed suit with Windows Live Local, featuring stunning new imagery. Bird’s Eye images provide a high-resolution, low-angle aerial view of a small area.

This website is the definitive guide and repository for the coolest Windows Live Local locations.

with a blog format and links divided into locations (where i found the sandia peak tramway) and categories (DO NOT miss “our favorites“), this is a very cool site…

at the moment the front page includes “the bat cave from the old TV show Batman“, “the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park in Buena Park, CA”, “numerous hovercraft at the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia, “The Simpsons mural at Fox Studios”, and “the fake McDonalds”…

oh, and they also have a list of all the cities covered by windows live local…  very cool – even microsoft doesn’t offer that anywhere, as far as i know…

this is one to keep an eye on…  (btw, they DO have an rss feed!)

ok, firstly, the pics from february are up…
i did sort of a rush job, so, some should have been touched up, and i chose the wrong skin color scheme, so, it isn’t pretty, but, meh, at least they’re finally online…
anyway, no autostitch pics from feb (march has a few to look forward to, though), but, there are a few webcam shots… also, this set finally has some pics of “Truman“, my new computer, so, everyone can see what i’ve been describing…
enjoy…

ok, next, since i get a lot of comments/questions about it, i would like to publicly let everyone know that my webcam sucks (hey, it was $15, you get watcha pay for)… it freezes up quite a bit, so, yes, when you view my webcam image, it might not be live… the program that uploads the images does just fine, so, it will have a current timestamp, but, it doesn’t realize the cam has frozen, so, it just keeps uploading the last image the cam provided before it froze…
the way it usually works is that after a few hours, the cam just freezes… so, while i’m at work, or when i am out for the day, at some point or another, the cam stops giving new images, and i don’t fix it until i get home…
BUT FOR THAT MATTER, keep in mind that, when i have it off, i have it set to just leave up the last image it took… i like that better than something that says “cam currently offline”… but, you can tell by the timestamp when i’ve done that…
anyway, maybe i’ll buy a new cam soon… buuuuuuut, the cam software i use is a bit of a resource hog, so, sometimes i shut it down intentionally when i have several progs open at once… if anyone wants to recommend a lightweight cam app that has ftp, feel free to hit that comment link below and lemme’ know…

and speaking of new progs, i am now playing around with SCWebCam and am lovin’ it…
it does something a little different… it takes a snapshot of my monitors and uploads them… soooo, when you look at my sidebar over there, you will see a new image below the webcam thumb and that is a live shot of my computer monitors… click on it and i have a full page set up for it like my webcam page, with the chatterbox and everything… plus, the two pages are also now cross-linked to each other…
since i am running two monitors and am letting the image be at 80% of actual size, it is pretty large… it may be a problem for those on dial-up… but, i have it auto-refreshing once a minute, so, that will hopefully be enough time for it to download completely…
(oh, and, in case someone might point it out, yes, SCWebCam also provides webcam features, BUT, it doesn’t have a feature or two i love on ConquerCam, like the dynamic caption that i can change in seconds from a button in the system tray (it’s the blue text at the top of the webcam image)…)

anyway, that’s it for now… oh, except that i was graciously donated a scanner by manuel, so, perhaps i will start uploading scans of photos from the old days…
we’ll see…

as promised, a brief intro to the subject for scott… if i don’t stop myself at this, i’ll end up writing twenty pages on the subject…

firstly, you wanted info on calvinism, here is wikipedia’s excellent (and thorough) entry…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism
it also has its own links to their stuff about arminianism…

btw, the thing i always quote goes like this…
a predestinarian sees a “freewill’er” trip and fall and mockingly says to him “what did you do that for?”…
a freewill’er sees a predestinarian trip and fall and mockingly says “i bet you’re glad that one’s over”…

another variation would be a predestinarian tripping and falling and saying to himself “i’m glad that one’s over” and, when the freewill’er trips and falls, he says to himself “now, what did i do that for?”

i don’t tell it as a funny, ha-ha, laugh-at-it joke (nor a literal allegation of either side), it is just a great illustration of how both of the extremes are ridiculous…

most people i know (who have thought it through) would typically go along with what is sometimes referred to as “class election”… that god chose the elect and we choose whether or not to be part of the elect…
i didn’t find an easy one-stop link for this yet…
but, the easiest summary is that we know what god’s elect has in store, the bible is full of promises of their destiny… we can choose to be part of that group or not… god is casting parts in a play and we can choose to play out that part or not… and we have the script, so, we know what is going to happen to the character…
of course, we don’t know our own individual destinies so specifically, but, again, the bible is replete with promises…

ok then, it’s what, the eighteenth of february?

ah well…

couple new things again this month…
like last month, i have a folder of panoramic pics made with AutoStitch…
this month, there is a new folder called “WebCam” and it has a very few notable moments caught on my cam… this will continue from here on out, assuming there are things worth posting and i actually hit that little ‘archive’ button on my cam when those moments happen…
i have also done something that was much-needed and actually made thumbnails for the vids this time around…

i think that is all there is to tell, right this way to the January 2006 pics…

oh, btw, i am playing with the settings in JAlbum to figure out how complicated it would be to start posting my pics semi-live… see, it can generate an album and then, you can add more pics to it and it re-generates all the pages and such… then, i could just continually post pics throughout the month, rather than doing one huge batch every month… just not sure if that’s what i want to do or not…
we’ll see…

anyway, site news…

first, briefly, i’ve changed the way the photos directories display and you can now read the full descriptions of all the folders… that’s awesome, take my word for it… sooner or later all the people who have complained in the past will see it and will no longer complain…

secondly, since no one else is around to do it, i spend a lot of time cleaning up people’s computers, installing new software and such, and, on my usb swiss army knife i carry my “Christopher Pack” (if google and lifehacker can have one, so can i), so, this all inspired me to add a list of links to info about apps i cant live without… you’ll find said list on the sidebar, under Links, the list is called “Apps I Can’t Live Without”… now everyone can be as 1337 as me 😛
ok, next, no, i never officially announced it in a post, but, yup, i gotta’ cheapy webcam here in my living room earlier this week… it’s on 24 hours a day, except when it’s not, refreshing every 10 seconds, unless i have it set for every 30 seconds 😛 😛 😛
needless to say, there’s not much in the way of alwayses and nevers with it, but, it’s already been fun…
it sits atop my monitor (erm, the primary monitor, the one on the coffee table) and shows me and everything behind me… of course, it’s often too dark to see much… some day i may just point it out the window for the cool view… in the webcam folder of this month’s pics, you can see an example of the view i have in mind… for now, i’ve been having too much fun waving to people and putting little “hello!” messages on it… it has a quick access dynamic caption feature, plus i have it set up to show my foreground window as well as what’s playing on winamp… man, from decade-long recluse to webcammer…
anyway, over on the sidebar, under “My Stuff”, you’ll see a thumbnail image from it and you can click on it to get to the full webcam image view page thingy… also, i have inserted the chatterbox into it so people can leave comments and, boy have they… never had so many chatterbox comments in the three years or so i’ve had one…

(btw, as of feb14, i have been back on the internet five years, here’s a little post from a couple years ago about it…)

oh, almost forgot… huge thing here… i upgraded to WordPress 2.0 here a little while back and it has an import wizard… so, i thought and thought and thought and finally decided to do it, i imported ALL my posts from my old website… that caused me to jump to 170 posts, dating back to april ’03… you can see a month-by-month list on the sidebar under “Archives”, which is right under my webcam thumbnail image… i still need to add category tags to all of them and that is a big job… (my “uncategorized” category grew immensely when i did the import…)
i wasn’t going to import the old posts and just leave the old site as sort of an old abandoned building to be explored by the venturous… i may still undo the import (if i can figure out how) and stick with that plan… BIIIIIIG difference between the christophercornelius.com website/life and the insidiousplots.com website/life and i have never thought it was a good idea to mix the two…

ok, anyway, one last thing, as you will catch hints of in the pics, i now have a new computer… the old one died a horrible death… i have a bunch of new pics of it in the upcoming february batch, it is integrated into the home theater system, with dvd, optical digital audio, and everything… i’m lovin’ it, it is so much better than my last one… you can check out more info about it than you could ever care about, i have uploaded the main page of my belarc advisor profile of it, it is the big bold link under “My Stuff”, the very first link, it says “Truman”… you see, i named the computer “Truman”… that’s my dad’s middle name and my dad is the one who got me started in computers when i was 10… he also gave me most of the parts to build this computer and much technical support… THANKS, DAD!

anyway, whew, what a long post, but, i think i’m done…

just a few links, not a comprehensive list… i was just going to add these links to the sidebar “looking at” list, but, they are scattered and there seems to be no one gateway point to get to all of them, so, i’ll put them together here…

most people know what i have to say on this subject, but, i will point out that it is important to remember that “video games” (i prefer something more like “the current generation of popular interactive entertainment“) are still growing up and the truly great artists are yet to emerge, even if we see a few pioneers… this is much like film was in the 40s and 50s, where many movies out there were trying to capture the stage experience on film, bringing broadway shows to those who could not go to broadway shows, for example… few people yet knew what to do with this “new artform”… but, flash forward to the late 1970s and we enter the age of the blockbuster… and today, there is no shortage of cinematic visionaries…
we will someday be at this point with interactive entertainment… and, even in the present, if one hears the phrase “video game” and think of a joystick, some bleeping, shooting aliens, or maybe munching blinking dots, they are at least twenty years behind in their understanding of the subject…

and i am now going to digress and move onto the links before i start getting into lists of examples 😛

04 December 2005 – Next Generation – Why Ebert Was Right

rogerebert.com :: commentary
Dec6,2005 :: Gamers fire flaming posts, e-mails…
Dec8, 2005 :: The Art of the Game 2
Dec14, 2005 :: The Game of Art 3

blog: scanners :: Jim Emerson / January 23, 2006 > Kojima: ‘Games are not art’

Duke City Fix » Hiking to the TWA Wreck

Anyone who has taken the tram up to Sandia Crest has probably overheard a passenger or two asking about the ‘crash site.’ They are referring to the wreck of TWA flight 206; a twin engine Martin 404 that slammed in to the west face of Sandia Peak on February 19, 1955. Sixteen passengers and crew were killed. While all of the bodies were removed, the remote location and rugged terrain necessitated leaving the bulk of the aircraft on the mountain in the upper portion of Domingo Baca Canyon in area that has since become known as TWA Canyon. A hike to the site makes for a memorable, if tiring, day trip.

ok, so, the december pics are up…

most of them are from the two weeks of resets… overnight work in abq/etc., santa fe, gallup, and farmington, me as the boss with between two and four temps as my crew on any given night… see, i had to take my cam to take pics of the bays when we finished them, so, i used it as an opportunity to take pics of work, something i never had pics of before… of course, this is not what i normally do for a living, but, meh…
before i move on, let me point out that somehow, there are some mistakes in the chronology of pics… specifically, it has the pics taken at the bernalillo store dated dec22, when they are actually the night of the 15th/morning of the 16th… no idea how the heck that happened… that is the only error i noticed…
anyway, a bunch of pics of me, jim, nicole, natalie, and robert doing triple resets in nine stores… that makes up most of this month’s collection (though, that includes some nice scenic stuff during the drives between gallup, farmington, and back home)… on that note, the last page of pics has a folder called “for work” and it is all the post-reset pics… i wanted to save them for future reference, they are not at all interesting, which is why they are at the end of the collection…

however…
the folder at the beginning of the collection is quite interesting, which brings me to the next stuff i wanted to cover, that being the two cool programs i have been using this month…

on the first page of pics is a folder called “autostitch”… the last couple weeks i have been playing with this amazing new app called (as you may have guessed) AutoStitch…
From the official website:

Autostitch is the world’s first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).

see the new image at the top of my webpages? that’s a panoramic view from my balcony of the mountains, created by AutoStitch… in the folder, i have quite a few test shots – sunrises, sunsets, many of my apt… so, be sure to look through those and, if it’s your thing, download the program and have as much fun as i’ve been having…
i’m sure i’ll be posting many pics made with this app in the coming months… (um, and just to be clear, the pics i’ve made so far with it are nothing special, just trying it out… but, you’ll see the potential from the pics i posted…)
and, btw, BIG THANKS to SuperDaveNM for posting about this program over on flickr!

ok, also, now that i have been using Irfanview all month, i must say i highly recommend it… the quickest thing i can say about it is that so many pics i took this month, like every month, were absolutely hopeless… too dark, too blurry, too washed out, etc…. and, with this prog, i saved MANY of them… not to say that other programs can’t do this (feel free to let me know of better ones!), but, this is the first i have used and am loving it to death… it made a DRAMATIC impact on this month’s pics… the first two pics in the collection show a great example of a pic i would have, without any doubt, deleted, but thanks to irfanview it was made into a keeper… gamma correction, contrast, color saturation, many great settings to do some great photo manipulation… and it is even a very nice media viewer in general, i even downloaded a movie and watched it the other day and it ran much smoother than even winamp… it’s a “thousand and one uses” kinda’ program, for sure…

ok, i think that’s about it… first i said i started using JAlbum and wanted to go back an “JAlbumize” all my past pics… well, now i want to go back and “Irfanviewize” many from the past and even see which ones could be “pano’d” by autostitch…

until that far off day, you’ll have to settle for clicking here to see all the december pics…

WOW!!

ok, i finally posted the rest of the photographic miscellany from november…
this month, i have finally begun something i have thought about doing for awhile… pretty much every month i post pics of hot air balloons i see from my balcony, but, this month i now have the pic with the name of that balloon, the home city, and pilot… there is no website i can find that is a visual guide to balloons and that’s a shame because they are all unique vessels with their own story, etc., so, i intend to start posting the name and other info about every balloon i get a pic of… i would love for enthusiasts who know something i don’t to post what they know… thanks to this album maker, every pic has a comments form, so, anyone who wants can post info… there are many balloons that are not in the book i am using for reference, so, every month there will be unknown balloons, if you know who it is, just leave a comment on the pic and let me know… i also know some balloons have a website, so, i also want to start adding links with the pics…
this could be fun and, if this collection grows large enough, i will make a dedicated section for it…

i know, scott… i’m a sick man 😛

ok, that aside, there are less than 40 of the “various” pics this month, mostly from a night at paulette’s…
click here to view the november pics

(and, if you didn’t see them previously, november also had a hundred or so pics, most of them amazing, from my flight to L.A. and 62 pics from the church thanksgiving hootenanny…)
.

in other news, come to find out my site has been seriously screwed up in internet explorer this whole time and no one told me about it until a couple days ago… my sidebar was loading on the right where it’s supposed to, but all the way at the bottom of the rest of the content… this has now been fixed, thanks to Doug… if i had asked him first, i would not have had to spend half the day pulling my hair out, beating my head on the table, etc…. thanks a bunch, dude!